django-ipfs-storage

Store Django file-uploads on the Interplanetary File System.

Uploads are added and pinned to the configured IPFS node, which returns the IPFS Content ID (a hash of the contents). This hash is the name that is saved to your database. Duplicate content will also have the same address, saving disk space.

Because of this, only file creation and reading is supported.

Other IPFS users access and reseed a piece of content through its unique content ID. Differently-distributed (i.e. normal HTTP) users can access the uploads through an HTTP→IPFS gateway.

Installation

pip install django-ipfs-storage

It uses the only Python maintained library for IPFS (as of March 2023) IPFS-Toolkit

Configuration

By default ipfs_storage adds and pins content to an IPFS daemon running on localhost and returns URLs pointing to the public https://ipfs.io/ipfs/ HTTP Gateway

To customise this, set the following variables in your settings.py:

• IPFS_STORAGE_API_URL: defaults to '/ip4/0.0.0.0/tcp/5001'.
• IPFS_GATEWAY_API_URL: defaults to '/ip4/0.0.0.0/tcp/8080'.

Usage

There are two ways to use a Django storage backend.

As default backend

Use IPFS as Django's default file storage backend:

# settings.py

DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'ipfs_storage.InterPlanetaryFileSystemStorage'

IPFS_STORAGE_API_URL = '/ip4/localhost/tcp/5001'

IPFS_STORAGE_GATEWAY_URL = '/ip4/localhost/tcp/8080'
IPFS_STORAGE_GATEWAY_API_URL = 'http://localhost:8080/ipfs'

For a specific FileField

Alternatively, you may only want to use the IPFS storage backend for a single field:

from django.db import models

from ipfs_storage import InterPlanetaryFileSystemStorage


class MyModel(models.Model):
    # …
    file_stored_on_ipfs = models.FileField(storage=InterPlanetaryFileSystemStorage())
    other_file = models.FileField()  # will still use DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE

Don't forget the brackets to instantiate InterPlanetaryFileSystemStorage() with the default arguments!

FAQ

Why IPFS?

Not my department. See https://ipfs.io/#why.

How do I ensure my uploads are always available?

I don't know. Maybe look into using ipfs-cluster to spread it across a few nodes? Or perhaps you could integrate Eternum's hosted pinning service.

How do I backup my uploads?

See above.

How do I delete an upload?

Because of the distributed nature of IPFS, anyone who accesses a piece of content keeps a copy, and reseeds it for you automatically until it's evicted from their node's local cache. Yay bandwidth costs! Boo censorship!

Unfortunately, if you're trying to censor yourself (often quite necessary), this means the best we can do is unpin the piece of content from your own IPFS node(s) and hope nobody else has pinned it.

How do I securely expose my IPFS daemon's API to connect remotely?

Someone please tell me.

How do I securely expose my own IPFS←HTTP Gateway?

Again, see above.